MEMORY
by f-f-frances
Summary: I've been told that I have the tendency to leave an unpleasant taste in the mouth of unsuspecting civilians. Yeah, I think I know what they're talking about. Mello's story, in Mello's POV. Caution: will contain MxM yaoi, language, and violence. T for now.


**Disclaimer: **If I owned Death Note, well...I don't actually have anything clever to say, so uh, yeah. It doesn't belong to me.

* * *

"I didn't mean to," I mumbled. I barely noticed my lips moving in the shape of the words I so desperately meant. "I didn't mean to," I repeated. My head felt like it was stuffed with cotton; my eyes like they had been replaced with sightless glass beads. Taxidermy had begun.

"I didn't mean to, I didn't...didn't m-mean to...s-she...I-I..." I didn't have the strength within my fatigued, sore body to reach a hundredth of the intensity that should have been present in my voice. I looked at the floor, my eyes half-closed, my lips still moving. They formed syllables I could no longer understand.

Shooting stars formed around the edges of the black-and-white tile floor that I hadn't realized I was staring at. I blinked with haphazard indolence, lethargic with shock - once, twice, three times. The pinpricks seemed to get larger and larger, more enveloping with every second, until the floor finally sank into their black abyss.

I hadn't realized the comfort of the ringing in my ears until all was silent.

* * *

Exactly three months after I killed my sister, I was sent to the hospital. I remember it was a month exactly because the calender and I became good friends when I was in the detention center – after all, contrary to popular belief, there were all kinds of dates to remember when you were incarcerated. I attended three hearings and a trial, and due to the decrepit management of the detention center, I was the sole person responsible for finding competent morons – excuse the oxymoron - to arrange my transportation to court. You'd think the government would regulate something like that, _somehow_, but they didn't pay much attention to the affairs of nine-year-old homicidal maniacs. Politicians had other things to attend to – such as appearance-making, image-polishing, dominance-boosting...things of that nature.

In conclusion, I was always staring at either a calender or a clock. The one in my cell had bright hot air balloons on it – and man, was it time-consuming to convince whoever the hell the people masquerading as higher-ups were to let me have it. You'd think, being as lax and apathetic as they were, they wouldn't particularly care if an inmate decided to paper-cut himself to death with a calender...but I suppose a suicide would have damaged the facility's reputation. My case _was _widely publicized around my little town – nine-year-old assaults and kills figure skating prodigy twin sister with the blade of an ice skate – so it would mean a pay reduction or even a loss of job for those who gave them the tool he used to off himself, despite the fact that my case wasn't exactly national news. I reassured them that if I wanted to kill myself, I'd do it with my own fingernails – after a couple of days of constant whining, I received my calendar. And, surprise surprise!, it was actually a calendar for the correct year. I had planned on having to take the time to modify it. Under supervision, they even let me have a pen to scribble notes on dates with!

At any rate, my lawyer (and parents) plead insanity. I decided to go along with it – I promptly failed all of the tests they gave me to prove otherwise. At that point, I was the king of psychology – I'd read more psych textbooks than the average student majoring in psychology. Cover to cover. I knew exactly what I needed to do to lead a comfy life in a psych ward. Soldiers did it all the time back in the day, and in my sparsely inhabited corner of Russia, ideas hadn't advanced too terribly much. After all, the literacy rate was less than 45% within a 100 mile radius of my home – any "psychologist" here was probably educated in a barn and given a license to practice out of governmental negligence. My parents had lived in St. Petersburg for ten years, making their fortunes doing who-knows-what (I never discovered their occupations due to general disgust toward them), but grew up in Elijburg. They chose to move back when my mother found out she was pregnant. They built a huge-ass mansion as far away from the "regular" inhabitants of Elijburg as possible and raised us leading a largely self-contained life. My sister – Jaine, she was called – became a figure skater and I a scholar. We were ignorant to the people on the "outside", and out parents wanted to keep it that way. They raised their noses to even their families, returning because of the superiority and fame it would bring them in the tiny town. As I said, disgusting people they were. But I digress.

The jury's verdict? Mental hospital for rehabilitation for as long as deemed necessary. It wasn't _quite _a hung jury, either – it took thirty minutes for them to decide on my fate, actually. Needless to say, it was more of a trial for me to keep the smugness off my face than the actual trial was a trial. I was chauffeured off to what a member of Elijburg might mistake for a limousine – my mother putting on quite a little show for those in the courtroom all the while, obnoxiously screaming to some unnamed deity to "have my baby boy, my precious Mihael, repent for his sins against you! Have mercy on his diseased soul!" – and I found myself at a pretty decent place, if I do say so myself.

It was a sterile sort of environment. Everything was tinted a funny shade of green by the light bulbs, but it was rather obvious that the janitors did well to keep the building as clean and white as possible. I lived in a dormitory with three sets of bunk beds but with only two other boys, both of which were often escorted away for counseling and/or solitary confinement due to their frequent bouts of hysterics. I usually had the room to myself, and while it was uncomfortably uninhabited-feeling and caused more than a bit of paranoia, it was peaceful enough if I closed my eyes. I mainly just laid around, only torpidly feigning insanity at that point. I figured I had a long time in there, whether they caught whiffs of my sanity or not. I soon learned that the building was reserved for only the wackiest of the wackadoodles, so I knew there wasn't much time spent questioning whether a resident was actually crazy or not.

And then, exactly three months after that – odd how coincidences like that happen – I was summoned to the main office for the first time. The woman at the front desk coolly informed me that I had a visitor and that I needed to follow an elderly man who was sitting in the reception area to an assessment room to meet said visitor.

His name was L.

* * *

**Note: **I really enjoyed writing this. I love dry, witty, first person narration. It's my niche. I hope I'm writing Mello well - my version of Mello, is, well...more mellow anyway. I hope I'm not going overboard - even though he's more mellow, he's also a little bit more insane.

I have lots of fluffy little plot bunnies running around in my brain that are in no danger of being massacred by my cat, so it shouldn't be too difficult for me to make this a long-going fic. Yay for copious amounts of muse, AM I RIGHT? Oh, by the way, first fic! Or, rather, first _published _fic, but you know. Kind of a milestone, I suppose xD I hope you guys enjoy it! Please review this – I would _really_ appreciate it. It makes me want to update faster, so yeah, there's an incentive for you...if I could be so arrogant to mention it. o:

xoxo  
frances


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